Deep Access

Bob Woodward is descending to my level. His housekeeper has just ushered me into the foyer of his elegant Georgetown home, and as I stand on the blackandwhite marble floor, the most famous journalist in America slowly makes his way down two stories of spiraling stairs until, finally, he is looking me in the eye and shaking my hand. "It's nice to see you," he says, gently placing a hand on my elbow and guiding me into a highceilinged room with two fireplaces and warm, creamcolored walls. He pulls the doors closed behind him and gestures for me to sit at a rich oak table. "Can I get you something to drink? Coffee? Water?" He disappears into the kitchen and comes back with a bottle of water, unscrews the top, and solicitously places it on the table in front of me. Then he sits down across from me and leans back in his chair, an expectant look spreading across his face.

It's a repertoire of moves Woodward has performed for countless visitors, most of whom are much more powerful than I. He bought the house in the mid'70s, when he was a young Washington Post reporter flush with success from bringing down a president. And while it doesn't appear on any tourbus routes, it's not a stretch to say that this beautiful Victorian home is one of Washington's great power centers. Because it's not just Woodward's residence; it's also known as "the factory," the place where Woodward coas secrets from the most influential people in American politics and where, in the thirdfloor office he usually keeps locked when he's not in it, he has for the past three decades banged out his blockbuster newspaper stories and bestselling books.

On the late summer morning that I visit the factory, the publication date for Woodward's latest book, State of Denial—his third, and perhaps final, take on the Bush administration—is only a month away. Woodward's friends and colleagues have told me that each new book puts a terrible amount of pressure on him: to justify Simon & Schuster's siigure first printing and the multipart series in The Washington Post that coincides with the book's release; to earn back his rumored sevenfigure advance; and to come up with a new batch of what Woodward calls "holy shit" stories. "Woodward is the hardestworking person I've ever seen," marvels David Greenberg, a writer and historian who served as Woodward's assistant on The Agenda, his 1994 book about the Clinton administration. "I would show up at 9 a.m., and he'd be at work. I'd leave at six, and he'd still be working. He'd always have more interviews lined up. There was always just more, more, more reporting." Peter Baker, a Post White House correspondent, is similarly awed. "He's a bestseller, he's famous, he's been depicted in several movies, he has more money than he'll ever be able to spend, and he's still working," Baker says. "He's still pushing to get these stories."

On this morning, Woodward is still making additions to State of Denial and compiling the book's index, which is why, he says, he can give me only an hour of his time. And even that hour has come grudgingly. When I first contacted Woodward to tell him I was doing a story about his coverage of the Bush administration, he'd said he was too busy for an interview. It was only after I'd written him a letter outlining the results of some of my reporting—a lesser version, to be sure, of the type of letter Woodward himself is famous for writing to reluctant sources—that he acquiesced.

Now that I'm here, Woodward doesn't seem very pleased. After the initial pleasantries, he suddenly gets tense and asks his assistant, a young man named Bill Murphy Jr., to join us for our session.

"I have some specific and some general questions," I say as a way of getting started, but Woodward interrupts. "Yeah, yeah," he says. "We have exactly one hour."

Woodward's desire to get things over with is understandable. The issues I want to raise with him come in the midst of the worst stretch of his career. Yes, he's had rough patches before. There was the Janet Cooke fiasco in 1980, when Woodward, serving as the Post's metro editor, oversaw the publication of a Pulitzer Prize–winning story about a child heroin addict that turned out to be a fabrication. There was his 1987 book about the CIA, Veil, which, despite having the benefit of fifty or so interviews with the agency's then director, William Casey (including one famous encounter at Casey's deathbed), managed to mostly miss the biggest CIA story of the time—the IranContra affair. And there has always been plenty of insidetheBeltway carping about Woodward's coziness with D.C.'s political elite. As one Washington journalist recently said to me, "His books aren't about Washington, they're of Washington. They're as much documents of the capital as any government document."

But the travails of the past few years have been of a different order. First, there was the May 2005 revelation that the deputy associate director of the FBI, W. Mark Felt, was Deep Throat. This should have been a triumph for Woodward, who for more than thirty years had to deal with suspicions that his famous Watergate source was a fiction or, at the least, a composite character. But instead the whole thing turned into an embarrassment when Vanity Fair scooped the Post on the story and the book that Woodward quickly published to capitalize on the events, The Secret Man, garnered bad reviews and disappointing sales.

Then, late last year, Woodward admitted that he was apparently the first reporter to learn from a government official (later revealed to be Richard Armitage) of Valerie Plame's role as a CIA operative and that he had failed to disclose the information to Patrick Fitzgerald, the independent prosecutor investigating the CIAleak case, and also to Len Downie, his boss and ecutive editor of the Post. Woodward claimed he'd passed along the information to fellow Post reporter Walter Pincus, but Pincus said he had no memory of Woodward doing so, adding, "Are you kidding? I certainly would have remembered that." The episode earned Woodward both an appearance before Fitzgerald's grand jury and the enmity of some of his colleagues at the Post. Deborah Howell, the paper's ombudsman, said it was "a deeply serious sin" that Woodward didn't tell Downie, and Downie himself took the rare step of publicly reprimanding Woodward—though he went to Georgetown and delivered the message over breakfast at Woodward's home rather than demanding Woodward come see him at the paper. This was just further evidence, some Post reporters suggested, that Woodward gets to play by a different set of rules. Hence his nickname at the paper: Mr. Carte Blanche.

The significance of these episodes was magnified because they occurred in the context of Woodward's ongoing and problematic coverage of the Bush administration. Not since the days of Richard Nixon has there been a White House this ripe for serious investigative reporting. And yet up to this point, Woodward has whiffed. (As one prominent D.C. journalist put it, "This administration has been Woodward's Waterloo.") His 2002 book, Bush at War, reads like hagiography as it tells the story of how the White House courageously responded to the September 11 attacks. The next book, Plan of Attack, about the runup to the war in Iraq, was a less credulous but still largely laudatory portrait of the decisionmaking behind one of the greatest foreignpolicy blunders in American history. Neither book contained the sort of hardhitting revelations people have come to expect from Woodward, particularly when there are evidently so many to be had. As one Washington journalist (who, like most people in D.C. with critical things to say about Woodward, spoke on the condition of anonymity) summarized: "The biggest stories of the administration and the biggest controversies—the NSA wiretapping, the CIA secret renditions, the aggressive interrogation techniques, the torture memos of the Justice Department, Abu Ghraib, the twisted intelligence, all the excesses that have been the big scandals of the Bush years—Woodward didn't get."

Woodward's most strident critics contend that he has sold his investigativereporter's soul. Newsweek's Howard Fineman called him "an official court stenographer of the Bush administration," and NYU journalism professor Jay Rosen told The Washington Post, "Bob Woodward has gone wholly into access journalism," suggesting that in exchange for access to top government officials, Woodward will go easy on his powerful sources in his books.

In his conversation with me, Woodward brushes off the criticism: "Are there discussions about what I should have done or how I should have done this? Sure. But there's more illumination about how Bush thought and decided, and how he responded to things, in [my books] than in probably all the other coverage combined."

Still, despite the brave face, several people close to Woodward told me that the criticisms have begun to take a toll on him. Downie noticed it during the Plame episode. "He's not used to having to acknowledge a mistake publicly," Downie said as we sat in the Post's ecutive editor's office, the same room where Woodward, Carl Bernstein, and thenecutive editor Ben Bradlee used to plan their coverage of Watergate. "I don't think he was used to that kind of pressure. This was a mistake that did go to his credibility, and that bothered him." Others detected that Woodward might be losing his famous cool when, last spring, in response to a critical column in The Nation by David Corn about his reporting in Plan of Attack, he wrote a 1,900word broadside that blasted Corn's piece as "thoroughly dishonest" and "another low for journalism." When I spoke to Corn about the flap, he said simply, "One of us acted rationally, and one of us didn't."

"I've never seen him rattled like that," one Washington journalist who's known Woodward for years told me, and another acquaintance was even more blunt: "He has to know he's been taken down. He has to know he's no longer the golden boy. He has to know he's kind of damaged goods."

If Woodward's reporting on this administration has been flawed, though, it likely has less to do with his currying favor with the White House and more to do with his inability to see how he might have been played by Bush.

"Over the years, Woodward's methodology hasn't really changed," contends Alicia Shepard, the author of the recently published Woodward and Bernstein. "He still starts at the bottom and works up until he's talked to as many people as possible and can paint the full picture." At the same time, though, as America's most famous journalist, Woodward often finds sources who are so starstruck they're eager to answer his questions. "He's seductive and he's likable," says Lanny Davis, a former special counsel to President Clinton and veteran D.C. spinner. "You find yourself talking to him when you just said you're not going to." Jack Shafer, a longtime Woodward watcher and now the press critic at Slate, describes him as "an ocean that will refuse no river."

Woodward's best books have been those that featured the most tributaries. His and Bernstein's 1976 epic account of the end of the Nixon administration, The Final Days, was based on interviews with 394 people. The Brethren (written with Scott Armstrong), which revolutionized coverage of the Supreme Court, boasted interviews with more than 200 sources. Woodward had over 250 sources for The Agenda, and he spoke with more than 400 people for his excellent 1991 book on the Gulf War, The Commanders. In those cases, he had to talk to so many sources because the story's central character refused to cooperate with him, or did so in secret.

But the Bush White House has rolled out the red carpet for Woodward. He has undoubtedly enjoyed more access to the president than any member of the press corps—close to four hours of interviews for Bush at War and more than three and a half hours for Plan of Attack. And he was furnished with copious amounts of classified information, including memos and documents that the White House resisted turning over to the 9/11 Commission, until the commission, according to one of its members, Richard BenVeniste, pointedly noted that the administration had already shared this material with Woodward. And for both books, according to multiple sources, members of the White House communications office, such as Karen Hughes and Dan Bartlett, urged various government officials to speak with Woodward.

Woodward himself wielded the club of presidential favor during an interview with Donald Rumsfeld for Plan of Attack. According to a transcript of the interview released by the Pentagon, Rumsfeld began the session by lecturing Woodward: "The last time we met, you asserted things, saying, You did this' or You said that,' as though you knew what I did. And you were wrong a lot… Almost everything you asked me was premised with an assertion that was either incomplete or wrong." Responded Woodward: "I have a good relationship with President Bush, and he wants me to do this, I think, as you know." Rumsfeld then fielded Woodward's queries for a few more hours.

"One of the main reasons Woodward and Bernstein were so successful during Watergate is because they didn't have access to the White House," says Shepard. "They worked around the edges. The obstacles they faced only propelled them to work harder to find sources outside the White House." But once this administration decided to cooperate with him, Woodward didn't need to work around the edges. This would seem to be reflected in the number of people he talked to for his first two Bush books—more than a hundred for Bush at War and roughly seventyfive for Plan of Attack. While not insubstantial, these are far fewer than his typical number of sources for past books.

And when Woodward's narrower net brings up sources who are particularly adept at manipulation, all sorts of problems can arise. "Given the kind of reporting he's doing, he makes himself vulnerable to a calculated strategy," argues one veteran political reporter. "And I can't believe that the Bush administration did not have a calculated strategy. This is Karl Rove's cup of tea." Another adds, "I think the Bush administration is, in a way, Bob's worst nightmare. Because deep down, they don't believe in the basic principles of public inquiry."

Making matters worse is Woodward's own abiding belief that he is somehow immune to the stumbles and errors that plague even the best journalists. "He has this idea that he's never wrong," says one prominent investigative reporter. "He has such extraordinary faith in his ability, and it is combined with little selfreflection when it comes to his work." As Woodward boasted to a group of Columbia Journalism School students in 2004, "Only one or two people ever lied to me in a book interview."

Perhaps the purest example of this problem—and the one with the greatest stakes—is the case of the "slam dunk."

Woodward has said that he hopes his stories will prompt a reader to exclaim holy shit! in amazement. And there was no louder chorus of holy shits than when readers came to the midway point of Plan of Attack and learned about a December 21, 2002, meeting attended by Bush, Dick Cheney, then nationalsecurity adviser Condoleezza Rice, then chief of staff Andrew Card, then CIA director George Tenet, and Tenet's deputy John McLaughlin.

According to Woodward's typically omniscient account, "The meeting was for presenting The Case' on WMD as it might be presented to a jury with Top Secret security clearances." But after McLaughlin made The Case, the president was unimpressed. "Nice try," Bush said before turning to Tenet and asking, "I've been told all this intelligence about having WMD, and this is the best we've got?" Woodward's narrative continues:

From the end of one of the couches in the Oval Office, Tenet rose up, threw his arms in the air. "It's a slam dunk case!" the DCI [Director of Central Intelligence] said.

It was unusual for Tenet to be so certain. From McLaughlin's presentation, Card was worried that there might be no "there there," but Tenet's double reassurance on the slam dunk was both memorable and comforting. Cheney could think of no reason to question Tenet's assertion. He was, after all, the head of the CIA and would know the most. The president later recalled that McLaughlin's presentation "wouldn't have stood the test of time," but Tenet's reassurance, "That was very important."

And thus does Plan of Attack absolve Bush, Cheney, and Rice in the matter of Iraq's nonexistent WMD and place the blame squarely on Tenet, who a few weeks after the book was published announced his resignation. The only problem is, Tenet and McLaughlin contend the December 21 meeting didn't happen this way.

In June, Ron Suskind published his new book on the Bush administration, September 11, and the war in Iraq. It's called The One Percent Doctrine but could just as easily be titled The Agency Strikes Back for its reliance on CIA officials angry at being scapegoated for the Iraqintelligence mess. The slamdunk episode is central to that scapegoating, and this is how Suskind describes the December 21 meeting:

Tenet and McLaughlin don't remember the meeting very well. Tenet, though outnumbered by what the President and other advisers claim they heard, doesn't actually remember ever saying "slam dunk." Doesn't dispute it. Just doesn't remember it. McLaughlin said he never remembered Tenet saying "slam dunk" either. He doesn't recall Tenet ever, in any context, jumping up and waving his arms. He and Tenet have both told close friends that it was a marketing meeting, not about the actual research, but about presentation. This may be a fine point of distinction, but when so much weight is placed on two words, context is important. The President's question, McLaughlin recalled, was "whether we could craft a better pitch than this—a PR meeting—it certainly wasn't about the nature of the evidence."

Barring the existence of a Nixonlike taperecording system in the Bush White House, it's likely we'll never know for sure whose account is more accurate. But one potential problem with Woodward's, one former intelligence official told me, is that the reporter never asked Tenet whether he said the words "slam dunk," much less about the context in which he might have said them, until after Plan of Attack had already gone to press. As one veteran Washington political operative notes, "Ninetynine percent of the time, if something harmful comes out of your mouth in a Woodward book, it means it came from someone else."

According to Murray Waas, an investigative reporter for National Journal whose own reporting has paralleled Woodward's, "The senior administration officials' Woodward would interview often had talked to each other about their memories' before they ever talked with Woodward and then would produce talking points for each other to prepare for their interviews with him. So what appears to Woodward, or to his readers, to be two or more independent corroboratory sources was actually only one."

The former intelligence official described for me how he thinks "slam dunk" made it into Woodward's book—and became the two most famous words of the Iraq war. "Within the White House and the vice president's office and the NSC, it's reasonable to assume that they'd decide amongst themselves what it is they wanted to highlight or not for Woodward. That's typically the way these things work. They'd get together and try to decide what information they're going to share, what documents they're going to show him, what story they're going to try to get him to tell. NSC officials, OVP officials, or White House staff would raise things with Woodward in their interviews, so that by the time he had his lengthy interview with President Bush, they knew he'd ask the president certain questions."

He continued, "Presidents are prepped for these sessions: They're told what's important, what are the key points, and then they play it back. And so the people prepping the president will say, Woodward will probably want to ask you about these meetings, and you remember that meeting in December when Tenet said "slam dunk," and you remember how important that was?' And the president will say, I guess.' And then he has the interview with Woodward, and Woodward brings it up, and the president says slam dunk.' It's just the way these things go. And after it comes out just the way they want it to, the people who helped plant it invite people's attention to it. So the administration is seen as the victim of bad intelligence."

As for why Tenet and McLaughlin merely told Suskind that they don't remember Tenet saying "slam dunk" rather than issuing a flat denial, the former intelligence official had a straightforward explanation: "You stumbled across two honest men in Washington."

Sitting across from me in his house, his assistant dutifully watching the minutes of allotted time tick away, Woodward will have none of this theory. "There can't be any question in your mind he [Tenet] said that," Woodward insists. He doesn't deny that he failed to ask Tenet about "slam dunk" before the book went to the publishers—"I'm not going to talk about whether I talked to Tenet or not," he bristles—but he dismisses the matter as irrelevant. "I talked to four or five people who were there, and I think the president is quoted on the record as saying that it happened." Besides, he says, after the book came out Tenet was quoted in Time saying, "Those were the two dumbest words I ever said." This should erase any doubt, Woodward argues. "If somebody says, Those are the two dumbest words I ever said,' that's confirmation, isn't it?"

The issue is larger than the specifics of the "slam dunk" question, though, and Woodward is eager to rebut any suggestion that his journalism has been compromised. "No one furnished me with anything," he interrupts when I begin to ask a question about the administration providing him with notes from the National Security Council meeting. "I did reporting to get information that's described in the book."

In fact, he boasts, if the White House tried to manipulate him, he foiled them. "There are all kinds of things in there which are not the administration's desired version," he insists, noting that Plan of Attack includes the story of how Bush authorized $700 million to be spent on building assets in the Persian Gulf before the war without informing Congress. "That wasn't Karen Hughes saying, Oh, we want Woodward to have this story.' "

But what of all the other damning stories that didn't find their way into Plan of Attack—stories that would seem to be much more significant than whether the administration fudged on prewar funding—and that were uncovered by other reporters who didn't enjoy anything near Woodward's extraordinary access? "Because somebody comes up with something in 2005 about what happened in 2001 that I didn't get in 2002?" he says, looking exasperated. "You'd like to get it, but no one else did in 2002, 2003, or 2004."

Woodward presses the point, questioning the ultimate significance of stories about illegal renditions or the official sanction of torture or illegal domestic surveillance. "I think the most important story of the Bush administration is the decision to go to war in Iraq," he says. "That's what he's going to be remembered for, and I think trying to find out how that happened—and why—is worthy." He continues, "Fastforward fifty years in history, the Iraq war is going to be in the history books. Maybe some of these things will be, but I'm not so sure. But I'm sure that the Iraq war will be."

This is certainly true, but the concern for Woodward should be whether his reporting will contribute to those history books in any meaningful way. Woodward has not only missed the "smaller" stories that he so casually dismisses but also the larger one—about the recklessness and duplicity and incompetence of the people responsible for this war. His new book, with its sharply worded title, appears to be a clear effort to make amends on that score. And although he won't discuss the book in detail, he hints that it contains significant new reporting on the twisted prewar intelligence and revelations about the poor decisions made after the war began. "It's a tough look at what happened in the last three years," he says.

But Woodward stubbornly refuses to acknowledge there were problems with the first two books. The closest he will come is when I ask him his opinion of the war and he says, "Too complicated, too complicated. Now is a very different time, 2006, than 2003. A lot has happened." If he recognizes the obvious, that he, like so many other reporters, was initially duped by this White House—and that because of his extraordinary access he was arguably played even worse—he's keeping that to himself.

Only at one point in the interview does Woodward show the avuncular, seductive side of his personality for which he is famous. After he is finished defending himself, the tension drains from him, and he sits back in his chair. In a gentle, almost confiding voice, he says, "Look, I'm writing about a war. A war is a big deal, highly contentious, and there's information in my books or reporting that people find politically useful or politically unuseful, and they use it." He looks me in the eye. "There are people in the CIA, or Tenet's friends, who are trying to distance him from that thing, and that's what's going on here."

And although my story is about whether or not he has been manipulated by the Bush administration, Woodward is warning me that I'm the one who's being manipulated. "You shouldn't be used," he cautions me, "because my goal is to not be used."

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